(reflections on writing, life, and the writing life by Suzanne Baldwin Leitner)

Monthly Archives: December 2013

I make no secret of the fact that I love where I live, and cherish it. It’s a great blessing to me to look out my kitchen windows and see the lake that has played such a big part in my life. If there is such a thing as mindless meditation, then I often am provoked to it, just staring out these windows.

Today, in our cove, the lake is that greenblack color – not the bottle green tipped with a hint of gray when the clouds and sun dance together on its surface. This green is inkier, and the way the waves are moving just now all slow and languid, it is easy to imagine it viscous and even warm.

Further out, peering at the merging main channel, all is some version of gray: dark water leads to a bright silvery line of mist on the far shore, up to a charcoal stand of trees, and up further still to the mop water clouds.

When I watch the lake move like today, I wonder if it’s all simply the force of wind and rain, or whether the old river’s current has it stirring all the way to its red muddy bottom, knocking loose the skeletons of the farms and homesteads underwater now – old tractors, barn remnants, rusted milk buckets, lockets, lies, guns, betrayals …

Having lived near this lake most of my life, I love it and fear it. It’s not the annual tales of the sighting of a hopelessly lost alligator, or the stories about the “catfish as big as a man” that scare me. It’s the things men do, and have always done, that they bury deep, that might be buried deep right out there right now. Deep, but stirring …

And, yes, I do answer myself back …

This is where I talk about how the sausage gets made and anything else that catches my fancy. Except politics. I gird my loins and do that elsewhere.
You and your questions and comments are all welcome here. If you are a writer, you have my sympathies (nudge nudge wink wink). No secret handshake is required. Do come in.
(The photography on this site is the original work of Suzanne Baldwin Leitner unless otherwise noted.)